Alex O'Connor
speaker
2,073 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 25 May
Alex O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They think that science will one day explain what consciousness is.
Yeah, and also, I want to be very clear here.
Lots of people will use this line of thought to try to sort of smuggle God in.
It's like a God of the gaps.
They'll say, okay, so science can't explain it, so God must do so.
That is categorically not what I'm doing here.
All I'm saying is that the lexicon of science cannot describe the origin of the universe and the nature of consciousness.
Those are the two things I think that science definitely can't describe.
That is not to say, therefore, God.
There might be some kind of what we might call naturalistic explanation.
It's just not one that can be mathematized and therefore not sort of appropriate to use the lexicon of science to describe.
That's fine.
No problem with that.
Of course, we still have this question.
We still want to know why is there something rather than nothing?
What is the nature of consciousness?
But I want to be very clear that this isn't some kind of underhanded way to, like motivated reasoning to leave room for God.
It's just to say that when people have this sort of confidence that the scientific method will explain everything because it's made such progress in the past, notice the precise nature of the progress it's made.
It's explained things, but only at a sort of deeper level of resolution.
It has described the mechanism, take natural selection, brilliantly, like Darwin figures out the mechanism by which
Showing 561–580 of 2,073 · page 29 of 104
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